Dublin City Council has partnered with Ookla and the City Telecoms Association to deliver a first-of-its-kind collaboration and white paper to better understand connectivity and coverage levels of mobile networks across the City. Using tens of millions of data samples from Ookla’s Speedtest Insights™ platform, the results provide an entirely new understanding of blackspots across the City.
“This is a great example of how the City is building a data-driven approach to digital connectivity and planning” – Jamie Cudden, Smart City Lead, DCC.
This is the most extensive city-level telecoms analysis to date in Ireland, and sets a new standard in Europe for the use of crowdsourced and fully anonymised network intelligence data to support city telecoms planning.
Read the full report is here and you can find out more on the City Telecoms Association site: https://city-telecoms.com/
The findings offer a practical blueprint for European cities to transform their telecoms strategies aligning with key city priorities around bridging the digital divide and maintaining digital competitiveness.
Key outcomes include:
Benchmarking and Progress Tracking: The study introduces a suite of key performance indicators (KPIs) to track Dublin’s telecoms competitiveness and policy effectiveness over time.
Identifying Connectivity Gaps: These insights enable targeted policy interventions and facilitate strategic discussions with operators to improve connectivity, aiding in the identification and mitigation of deployment barriers related to site acquisition and planning pushback near new residential developments.
Leveraging City-Owned Assets: This white paper provides an innovative framework to enable the City Council to strategically utilise its rooftop portfolio for telecoms deployments and promote increased site sharing through the planning process.
Enhancing Citizen Engagement: The data insights illustrate the benefits of new telecoms site types, such as small cells and streetworks monopoles, fostering greater transparency and building public support for telecoms in Dublin.
Studying the Impact of Social Deprivation: By overlaying crowd-sourced network performance data with socio-economic indicators from Pobal, an Irish government agency, the City Council is assessing how targeted policies can promote digital inclusion and address connectivity gaps in underserved Dublin communities.
The full report is available here